A seminar with Alena Pfoser “Tourism as memory-making: Russian tourism in the shadow of empire”. The meeting will be chaired by Zuzanna Bogumił
Abstract:
Until recently the Russian Federation used to be one of the largest markets for outbound travel. Among Russians’ favourite destinations were cities that used to be part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and are now located in the independent nation-states bordering Russia. Based on extensive ethnographic research with tourists and tour guides in the cities of Tallinn, Kyiv, and Almaty before Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, the presentation provides an empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated account of the mnemonic interactions between Russians and their neighbours in the shadow of empire and geopolitical confrontations. It analyses the practices through which cultural memories are performed in tourism encounters, as well as the forms they take, discussing imperial nostalgia, the production and consumption of national pasts, and memory diplomacy as key modes of remembering in Russian tourism. Overall, the presentation reflects on the legacies of imperial patterns of thought in Russian tourism while also pointing to the limitations of focusing solely on imperial nostalgia when analysing Russians’ mnemonic relations to the territories of the former Soviet states.
The book on which the presentation is based is available in open access and can be downloaded here: Tourism as Memory-Making: Russian Tourism in the Shadow of Empire (https://link.springer.com/
Alena Pfoser is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, UK and a Mercator Fellow (2023-2026) at the Leibniz Institute for Society and Space. Her research focuses on cultural memory, territorial borders, and tourism and heritage industries and has been published widely in peer reviewed journals such as Memory Studies, Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Heritage Studies and others. She was the Principal Investigator of “Tourism as memory-making: heritage and memory wars in post-Soviet cities” (2019-2022, ES/R011680/1) funded by an ESRC New Investigator Grant which forms the basis for her new book published in March 2025 in Palgrave Macmillan’s Memory Studies Series.
About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial Russian Far East”, no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and Social Memory and the Post-Imperial Russian Heritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.